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First hit from DL Byron
Blog Business Summit: Cycling is the new golf. It’s a circular post, but thanks to the new google blog finder, I found someone blogging about me blogging about cycling. I gather that it really is the new golf. Which is good, I took up biking six years ago and golfing two. I can promise you…
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Google’s Firefox Extensions
Google Firefox Extensions. Wow, innovation continues. There are no less than six plug ins for firefox I had not heard of. They have Google safe browsing that identifies ifyou have a bad page and there is a little widget called blogger web comments to tell you what someone has said about a particular page. You…
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Ski Pass Discounts
Whistler Lift Tickets and Season Passes. You need to an IRS tax attorney to understand the pricing structure at Whistler/Blackcomb. The big points are: * Skiing is free if you are 6 or under. Cool! * If you are a Washington or BC resident, you get an EDGE card. This gives you about a 20%…
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NSLU2 and WRT54GL or NAS for home
NetworkGarage.com: NAS Done Right. Andrew is trying to use NAS at home. I actually tried this as well last year. Bought USB enclosures and the NSLU2. Basically at least back then, it was incredibly unreliable and the USB enclorues are quite loud. Performance is only OK, but the main issue was the constant crashes under…
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Tweakguides for Games
Every gamer wants to make their system faster, so after overclocking like mad, check out “TweakGuides.com”:http://tweakguides.com for the latest on specific tweaks to improve performance: TweakGuides.com – Call of Duty 2 Tweak Guide. A nice review for Call of Duty “What is Antialiasing?”:http://www.tweaktown.com/guides/601/the_simple_antialiasing_and_anisotropic_guide/index.html a guide for those of who think Anisotropic is something that happens…
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Update now
Wireless LAN Products – Download Windows* Software for Intel? PRO/Wireless Network Connection. A bunch of sites say the new Intel wifi software finally fixes various problems like connection drops and so forth. They are right. My new VAIO works perfectly with it. And if you don’t have an OEM who updates you the generic Intel…
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H.264 in .MP4 files
Talk about an arcane topic. I can’t believe that Windows is so complicated when it comes to playback! Anyway, the new iPod expects its video in H.264 format. Videola produces this in a .MP4 file, but how do you play this back on the PC to check it. Well, the easy way is to use…
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Wallpaper Changer
Now that I’ve got Nostalgia as my screensaver, next thing is to change the desktop wallpaper automatically too. Again, there are bunch of free utilities: * “Microsoft Powertoys”:http://www.worldstart.com/tips/tips.php/312. Before the era of activation keys (I just had Office die and we had to call up because the nVidia driver rearranged the CD-ROMS on my machine.…
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Cool Screensavers
Freeware Home – Desktop … Cosmetic Tools … Screen Saver Tools. The Mac has a really cool Ken Burns like screen saver. There is also a video screen saver that Microsoft has, but it requires validation and is a pain to load. So what’s free and good: * 4View Screen Saver. This create tiled images…
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nVidia new drivers 81.xx and 6.7x
Tong Family Blog: nVidia Driver Install. The newest drivers for nForce4 and also for the latest 7800GTX are apparently real performance boosters. Big recommendation over at Anandtech to update. You can get these from “nVidia”:http://nvidia.com It is tricky to do this, follow the instructions noted. You need Driver cleaner to do this so you make…
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Dual Core Performance
AMDZone :: The real #1 source for AMD news, reviews, and info. Est 1998.. Both AMD and Intel as well as nVidia and ATI have been busy. The latest nVidia drivers post version 80.xx support dual core improvements as do ATI drivers 5.13 and later. The performance improvement isn’t large as most games are graphics…
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Got an extra X2 lying around…
AnandTech: Mid-Range to High-End Buyer’s Guide, January 2006. If you have an extra X2 lying around, then it is a shame not to use it. It was from my blown DFI LanParty board. In any case, Anand was nice enough to write a January guide for the best motherboards and things.
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Bike Stand
!>http://www.cyclingnews.com/photos/2005/tech/reviews/ultimate_pro_elite/Ultimate_Pro_Elite_full_viewtn.jpg! www.cyclingnews.com news and analysis. Phil got one last week and I’m amazed at how good a truly nice a stable one can be. This ones is the Ultimate Pro Elite for $250 list, but the knock-off from “Performance”:http://www.performancebike.com/shop/Profile.cfm?SKU=19982&item=40-2198&slitrk=search&slisearch=true is just $140 right now. It is a nice one. The main thing being that it…
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Rebates Galore
Now that you’ve bought all that loot, get your rebates. Manufacturers lover ebates because 70% of the time, folks don’t do the work to fill it in. Even when you do, about half of mine get rejected, so here is this seasons. * 1310-1DT.pdf (application/pdf Object). $50 off LCD monitors from HP.
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PowderWatch Northwest
SkiWashington.Com. It is very hard to see *all* the resorts and to know where they are in terms of snow and so forth. Plus where the “webcams”:http://www.skiwashington.com/webcams.php are as well. Also,there is a “powder alert”
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Railroad Tycoon Update 3 and other updates
RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 for PC Downloads – RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 Downloads – RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 Demos. Seems like every game these days ships with a sea of bugs. RollerCoaster Tycoon in our case just crashes out of the box on a vanilla XP machine, hope one of these updates help. In this case, it needs…
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What is Cerulean Blue?
!>http://webexhibits.org/pigments/indiv/i/105paintedSwatch/ceruleanblue.jpg! Cerulean blue – overview. Calvin heard this and was wondering. A very cool shade. And another great Calvinism that I just had to share. While riding mountain bikes down a trail, I said, Alex you are doing well as are you Calvin and he says, bq. Alex, he’s a single track artist Should be…
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Oggcodecs decodes Flac
illiminable Ogg Directshow Filters for Speex, Vorbis, Theora and FLAC. I use FLAC for lossless compression to archive music. Until now I’ve used winamp to playback FLAC files or dbPowerAmp to convert them back to WAV or MP3. A strange thing is that Ogg has a set of DirectShow filters that will let any DirectShow…
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Final restaurant picks
Here were some final picks: * Asia-Vous Restaurant Restaurant Escondido CA Review Gayot. Asia-Vous has gotten great reviews, but is closed Sunday and Mondays. Too bad! “San Diego Magazine”:http://www.sandiegomag.com/dining/index.shtml has its readers choice and some of their favoriate are Hacienda de Vega 760-738-9804. For Japanese, amazingly in the North County Mall is Onami. It is…
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San Diego Restaurants
Looking for a place to go out, well San Diego seems to be a sea of Carl’s Jr’s and King’s Table, Costco hot dogs and other fast food places. Moreover, like LA, the traffic is so bad, you can’t just go out, you’ve got to plan. Besices the San Diego local newspaper called the “San…
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Graphedit to debug audio and video problems
REALtime FM MP3 Recordeing. When you load as many codecs as I do, it is often mysterious what is really going on, so there is a tool called graphedit from DirectX toolkit lets you find it. You load the File Open and you can see what DirectX would actually load. You can load it from…
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Ken Burns Effects Fast and Easy
Panning and Zooming on Photographs2. While you can create your own with a general purpose tool, About.com has some good advice about specific tools. These take a bunch of photos and does the Ken Burns thing, they then product video files that you can then stuff into a DVD. bq. The best way to achieve…
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Ken Burns Effects in Vegas
Learn to Pan/Crop in Sony Vegas. There is also a nice guide in the product, but this is a quick lesson in how to create movement in a bunch of stills. Apparently there are products that do this automatically, so you don’t have to set a crop and path for every photo according to Bill.
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San Francisco Day Spas
San Francisco Day Spas. A great list of spas in San Francisco.
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Vegas importing from a still camera
VEGAS FAQ!. My latest problem. You can actually see the video which comes out as a .AVI, but Vegas (a.k.a. Video Explosion) can’t read it. Here’s the FAQ from a very useful Vegas site called vasst.com. Much more useful than the Sony site.. Why can’t Vegas see the video from a file captured by a…
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Unlocking your Sony VGN-630B
The Future of Music Weblog. Here’s how to unlock your Sony notebook SIM so overseas you can use other data services: 1. **Very IMPORTANT** Before starting anything, make sure you have the ORIGINAL Cingular SIM inserted in your laptop. It will NOT unlock if you have your T-Mobile SIM inside during the unlocking phase. 2.…
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Sony VGN-TX630B Downlaods
Sony eSupport – VGN-TX630P. It isn’t obvious where to find it, but this is where you find the latest updated drivers. Probably the most importatn right now is the Wireless LAN update. It should fix lots of 2200BG problems. I still have a problem with Cingular Connection Manager. After a while the low level driver…
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CD Ripping for Geeks
While 99.99% of all folks will just use the built in ripping in iTunes or Windows, for the true geek, there are really only two ways to do it. Either use Exact Audio Copy or dbPowerAmp with Accuraterip and LAME. So its complicated, but worth it for accuracy. Here’s a quick guide for fellow geeks:…
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Zone Alarm System Error
broadband ? Forums ? Security ? Zone Alarm upgrade problem…. If you upgrade an old version, life is hell., In fact Zone Alarm locks up the internet. Instructions on how to clean it up. Also “Iggy”:http://iggyz.com/unzap.html has the details: REBOOT. To make sure that you can see the ZoneAlarm Plus/Pro system files, if they are…
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Limited or No Connectivity with Windows XP SP2
PC Hell: How to Fix Problem with Limited or No Connectivity After Installing Windows XP SP2. I get this error quite a bit on my Wifi clients. This might be the hotfix that repairs it. Other folks have reported that installing the latest Intel Proset Wireless client helps.